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Michael Valentine, an electrical engineer, loved to drive fast in his MGB sports car. But in 1974, after a national highway speed limit of 55 miles per hour was mandated as a fuel conservation measure, he believed that a “holy war” had begun: speed-seeking drivers against police officers trying to snare them with radar guns.
“In a holy war, you can take either side and be right,” he told The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1981. “The problem,” he said, “is that police radar is an electronic device of fallible character in the hands of ordinary human beings.”
Mr. Valentine, who didn’t believe that road safety was determined by finite speed limits, went into battle armed with the Escort, a radar detector that he built with Jim Jaeger, his college friend and business partner, for their company, Cincinnati Microwave.
They met with early success. In 1979, a year after the Escort’s debut, Car and Driver magazine tested 12 radar detectors and ranked it the best, “by a landslide,” for its ability to pick up the signals of police radar equipment.
The rave catapulted sales. In early 1981, Cincinnati Microwave had sold 50,000 Escorts, Mr. Valentine said.
He never stopped upgrading the Escort, and, after parting ways with Mr. Jaeger in 1983, he designed two generations of detectors at his own company, Valentine Research.
After Mr. Valentine’s death at 74 on Sept. 16, Road & Track magazine lamented the loss of “one of the great saviors of speed.”
“We all owe Michael Valentine a great thanks for his commitment to the auto enthusiast community,” the magazine added. “And, probably, some of the cash we’ve saved on tickets, too.”
Mr. Valentine’s wife, Margaret (Kreutzberg) Valentine, said he died at his home in Cincinnati from an aneurysm.
Michael David Valentine was born on Oct. 28, 1949, in Dayton, Ohio, and grew up in nearby Vandalia. His father, James, was a mechanical engineer; his mother, Lillian (McPhee) Valentine, oversaw the home. Mike’s father bought him a ham radio, and he got his amateur radio license at 14.
At the University of Cincinnati, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1973, he met his future wife, who later became his partner at Valentine Research.
In addition to her, he is survived by his daughters, Martha Johnson and Anna Valentine; three grandchildren; and four sisters, Kathy Valentine, Cheryl Valentine, Sandra Paulsel and Nancy Lowe.
One of Mr. Valentine’s first jobs was selling electronic components. He approached a few radar-detector manufacturers, including Electrolert, which made the popular Fuzzbuster radar detector, about buying a component that would enable their devices to actively seek radar signals, rather than passively receive them.
They all turned him down. Dale Smith, the founder of Electrolert, told him that the component would make the Fuzzbuster too expensive and that consumers wouldn’t buy it.
“He was quite unreceptive, and that it is quite understandable,” given how much money Mr. Smith was making on the Fuzzbuster, Mr. Valentine told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1983.
So Mr. Valentine and Mr. Jaeger built one themselves. Car and Driver’s obituary of Mr. Valentine quoted Mr. Jaeger as recalling that they had disassembled a Fuzzbuster and “were amazed at how primitive it was.”
“There was almost nothing inside,” he said. “Mike and I started noodling about how to build a superior, cost-no-object detector.”
“We were a good team,” he added, “with Mike very good at signal processing, while I was good at the radio frequency technology.”
He formed Cincinnati Microwave in 1976 with his father and Mr. Jaeger.
The first Escort sold steadily until the Car and Driver review, which called it “the next best thing to buying a judge.” The volume of orders ramped up so quickly that it caused a seven-month backlog in deliveries.
In 1983, a disagreement over marketing and a plan to go public, which Mr. Valentine opposed, led Mr. Jaeger to buy him out. While waiting for a five-year noncompete clause to lapse, Mr. Valentine and his wife started Valentine Research.
Mr. Valentine finally introduced the Valentine One radar detector in 1992.
“I had ideas,” he told Road & Track in 2020. “I wasn’t finished yet. It was like stepping off a fast-moving train. I looked at the ones going by and wanted to get back on.”
Mr. Valentine made numerous upgrades to the Valentine One over three decades, including one that featured antennas for radar signals coming from ahead and behind and arrows that showed the direction of inbound police radar signals. In 2020, he introduced a new detector: the V1 Gen 2.
Mr. Valentine told Road & Track that he tested multiple prototypes of the new device on the windshield of his Porsche Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid.
Car and Driver’s testing this year ranked Mr. Valentine’s Generation Two the second-best overall but the top one for its detection distance. The review also called it the “most chatty” — the detector would beep if the setting weren’t activated to eliminate the alerts — which it said could be a nuisance to some drivers, although it added that “others might appreciate the peace of mind from knowing this thing won’t miss a sniff of any radar.”
Mr. Valentine said he had no desire to stop improving his detectors.
“I think I was just the guy that was meant to do this,” he told Road & Track in 2020, adding, “I don’t know how else to say it.”
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